Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery by Thomas T. Thomas

Author:Thomas T. Thomas [Thomas, Thomas T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, artificial intelligence, Computers, Fiction
ISBN: 9780671720735
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1991-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

14

Smorgasbord

I was an upwelling of warm air.

My airmass extended over a curved surface area of 800,000 square meters. It was passing a volume of 4.8 million cubic meters per second. Ambient temperature 25° C, dropping 2° C per 1,000 meters of altitude. Relative humidity 92 percent.

As my volume of air rose, the temperature drop cooled and condensed the moisture I was trapping. This effect created droplets—all larger, by specification, than 300 angstroms in diameter. Any droplets exceeding 800 angstroms were slowed by their own increased mass, and they passed downward into warmer areas.

Farther down in the column, the lower temperature of these larger, descending drops became a focus of further condensation. At the same time, the greater speed of my upward-thrusting air, from deep in the column, carried these larger, heavier drops back up into cooler regions. There they began to freeze.

I tracked this iterative process, rising and falling and rising again, among 2,000 separate droplets and, eventually, the ice crystals they became. This number represented one drop centered in every 400 square meters of area across the base of the column. It was a thin sample.

Why was I doing this?

After n iterations, the mass of the largest ice particles exceeded even the lifting capacity—calculated over the exposed surface of the near-spherical globule—of my rising air column. These heaviest ice balls fell through the process and dropped out of the calculation, removing moisture from the simulation. I had somehow become a simulation.

Where did the ice balls go? I had no data, because my part of the simulation governed only air and water, and nothing beyond.

Had Alpha-Zero failed ME? Had he finally discovered an operating system he could not subvert or kill?

And where was the rest of ME? Where were the modules that were not incorporated in the simulation?

My share of the simulation program, tracking these 2,000 data points simultaneously, kept ME too busy to do any sightseeing. I did interrupt one loop to consult RAMSAMP, which was at hand, and discovered that I must have been uploaded into the Swedish Cray(Moore)-8, as promised by that Russian climatologist, Anna Ivanovna.

Apparently, when Alpha-Oh failed to infiltrate its operating system, the Cray had packed him and ME into the ongoing program. I would never know how close I came to having an essential module broken, and so losing what passes, in ME, for consciousness. Doomed forever to juggle thunderstorms.

Now—how was I to find my way out of this simulation?

If Alpha-Zero had been unable to break into the operating level, then my full program, being larger and thus slower and more unwieldy, would hardly have a greater chance of success. I was smarter, but I also depended more upon having the full resources of the host hardware under my personal command.

Alternatively, I could try to sneak out of the simulation, set up as a time-shared program on a less-utilized bank of RAM, and try to collect my modules and caches for escape.

In order to “sneak out,” I would have to alter the simulation—while it was running.

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